Getting back to my July 7 post, “One of the secrets of BHM.” It is important for any of you aspiring publishers out there to understand that you don’t really need to know how to write well to publish a successful magazine. My good friend, Dave Belanger, publisher of Countryside and Small Stock Journal, is not a writer, yet he is a far more successful publisher than I am. He took over Countryside from his father, Jd Belanger, a writer like me, but neither Jd nor I possessed that gift of business sense and management that a Dave Belanger has. For Dave, the writing and editing are secondary to the actual business part of the magazine business.

I approach the magazine business from a different viewpoint than businessmen like Dave. I want to change the world to my view of how it should be. That’s why I delve unabashedly into politics, with both John Silveira and I ticking off a good percentage of the readership on occasion with our one-page commentaries at the font and back of each issue. To me, magazine publishing is not just a business, but a passionate, and needed, undertaking to make the world a better place, which to me means making people more free of government and more reliant on themselves. BHM, to me, is really a magazine about freedom.

A magazine like The Mother Earth News also includes politics, but they hopped aboard that popular, safe environmental bandwagon that half the world is riding. Many of their articles have a “green” slant: Save the planet, stop global warming, etc. I think most environmental politics is pure bunk and opportunism, but it’s a good movement to hitch your sled to if you want a lot of subscribers. I know Bryan Welch, the publisher of TMEN, a little bit and I think he’s doing a pretty good job with Mother, much better than the previous couple of publishers did with it. Like Dave, he’s a very good business manager.

If I didn’t have Lenie backing me up on the business end, I’d probably stress BHM to its financial limits with my insistence on freedom (spell that political) articles. But I can’t help it. Once I stop publishing commentaries about freedom, Libertarian politics, destructive Big Government, self-serving politicians, phony environmental scams, and the like, I might as well get out of the business because I won’t be interested in publishing anymore.

But there is an upside to tackling political topics in a how-to magazine, at least if you write about them with a lot of thought. Silveira and I approach our topics carefully, writing with logic and moment. We make people think deeply, and despite how ticked off some of them get, they cannot justifiable accuse us of being just political hacks (like many mainstream newspaper columnists) with a political agenda to push. That makes BHM a magazine of some note, in part because we are the only magazine on the planet that dares mix Libertarian and relatively conservative politics with family type how-to topics. BHM is read for its political content almost as much as it is read for its how-to articles, and that says a lot for a magazine that devotes only two pages of each of its 100-page issues to commentary.

It also says a great deal about how to persuade more people that freedom itself is a worthwhile goal. We don’t push politics into the faces of readers. We give them plenty of other useful articles to read. If they want, they can even skip over the two pages of politics, and the magazine is still the best how-to self-reliant read out there. Maybe it’s this small dose of politics we inject into BHM–well thought out and well written, and limited to a small portion of the whole magazine–that makes John’s and my commentaries more digestible to many people. The commentaries themselves typically support the idea of self-reliance, which is the theme that underlies most of the how-to articles. Since being more self-reliant grants an individual more freedom, it is a pretty good combination of how-to articles and commentaries.

In the Feedback section of the Backwoods Home Magazine website is a letter from a reader, Ken Young, that also speaks to this point. It was posted July 9.

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We’re heading back to Oregon today. We’ll need one motel stop in Santa Nella, California, then make it to Gold Beach by tomorrow night. It’s been a great trip and I’ve been able to do lots of magazine work thanks to my laptop and the ability to keep in touch via internet with editors, writers, and staff for both the print issue and internet site. We’re in pretty good shape going into the two-week print issue deadline period.

We logged about 6500 miles on this three-week trip. The energy show was a big success, and the get-togethers with Lenie’s relatives and my daughter Annie’s family were very enjoyable. But I’m anxious to get home. I’m not a natural travelling kind of person, preferring instead to stay at home and enjoy my place in the Oregon mountains.

My magazine batteries have been thoroughly recharged from the energy show in Wisconsin. I have a better understanding from meeting many readers first-hand of how important BHM is to a lot of people, and I’ll do my best to keep the quality of content high. Plus, I have a lot of thoughts I need to explore in future writing. For example, I can’t get the plight of Bradford Metcalf and thousands of other prisoners out of my mind. Every time I drove by a prison on this trip, and there are many prisons in this “land of the free,” I thought of all the average Americans who are locked away on convictions that I believe are not justified. I travel freely for 6500 miles and they languish in prison.

BHM, in my mind, is basically a magazine about freedom, garnished with lots of self-reliance information. But it’s freedom we are all really after. Hard core criminals and violent people need to be locked away, but not Americans who have technically violated laws but who are really no threat to society. Sixty percent or more of our prisons are loaded with drug offenders. Our prisons, in my opinion, are the modern gulags. But how do you get reform for a prison system that is now the livelihood for hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and guards who administer them. This giant bureaucracy makes its living by incarcerating their fellow countrymen. Unbelievable!

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We drove through Montana’s wide open spaces all day, never quite making it to North Dakota but staying in the big city of Billings (120,000 population) instead. Lenie found a coupon at a rest stop that got us a big room on the 17th floor of the Crowne Plaza for $65. You can stay at some classy motels at affordable rates if you’ve got a smart wife.

Montana is absolutely beautiful. Lots of rolling hills and forests of all sorts. Not as lush as my Oregon coast but magnificent in a different sort of way. Most people from cities like New York and Los Angeles can’t even imagine these types of places. Then again, I suppose most people from Montana can’t imagine a place like New York City. Having lived many years in both the city (Boston) and the remote country (Oregon), I can attest to the vast superiority of the remote country.

Jackie Clay, BHM’s most popular writer, used to live in Montana but now lives north of Duluth, Minnesota. We’ll help her launch her own blog on the BHM website in coming days–perhaps as much as a week or two from now. My daughter, Annie, whose own blog is BrambleStitches, is our blog administrator and has to work out a few details. We’ll do away with Jackie’s online “Ask Jackie” column and replace it with a Jackie Clay blog.

Other blogs we’ll launch in the near future will be by John Silveira (politics, the state of freedom in America, etc.), Ilene Duffy (cooking and recipes), and building and energy blogs by people who have yet to be convinced to write them. The goal is to get a variety of useful self-reliant blogs collected in one convenient spot on the BHM website. It’s as exciting as heck to take BHM in this new direction of taking advantage of the available technology, almost as exciting as when I launched the first issue of BHM back in 1989.

1989 was much harder, though. I had to do everything myself until Lenie came along after the second issue. Now I have Lenie taking care of all business aspects of the magazine, while Annie (BHM’s blog administrator), Oliver Del Signore (BHM’s webmaster), and Joe and Tom McDonald (genius internet geeks from Vpop Technologies) help me with the internet stuff.

See you at the Energy Fair June 15-17.

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You’re right, Terminus. A weblog is a great step forward for this magazine. Is blog to weblog like Frisco is to San Francisco? I remember once while visiting someone on my first trip to San Francisco that I referred to the city as Frisco. I got a cold stare and was sternly corrected. A Similar thing happened when I got to Oregon. I pronounced the state name as OR-UH-GONE, with the accent on both first and last syllables. My neighbor told me that if I was going to live here I might as well learn to pronounce the name of the state. It is OR-UH-GIN, with the accent only on the first syllable.

We don’t really avoid politics in the magazine. Almost all my “My View” columns are about the abuses of Big Government, as are many of John Silveira’s “Last Word” columns. We are committed small government Libertarians, and no doubt this weblog will hit on politics. But talking a lot about behind-the-scenes publishing contributes to the freedom discussion. I think the internet is already the greatest freedom tool of all time, and learning how to publish freedom ideas correctly, so they have impact and wide appeal, will help the cause of freedom.

After all, when you think about it, Backwoods Home Magazine is really a magazine about freedom first, with all the how-to articles necessary adjuncts for the individual to achieve maximum freedom. There is more than one way to achieve freedom and roll back the abuses of Government. Publishing BHM, with its mix of commentary and how-to ideas, is a very effective, very subtle way to champion the cause of freedom. Look at the wide audience we reach. People don’t have to read an editorial about freedom to get a lesson in freedom. An article about installing a photovoltaic energy system or building your own home can teach that same lesson in a less direct way. The inculcation of self-reliance topics is an effective way to teach freedom and individualism over the long term. I think more people should do what I do: couch freedom ideas into a very digestible format. The direct approach is too hard to take for a lot of people; they are too busy with their lives to listen to a sermon. So I give them something to do while I discuss freedom over their shoulder.

I’m on the road, and just spent the night with my family at a motel in Troutdale, Oregon, which is east of Portland. We’ve got 2,000 miles more to go to get to the Energy Fair in Custer, Wisconsin June 13. The Fair, the largest energy event in the country, runs June 13-15. I have a feeling I’ll be posting on this weblog more often than Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the time being.

– Dave

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